📄️ Introduction
Information architecture in complex professional software has almost nothing in common with IA on the web. Web IA organises content so people can find it, using navigation hierarchies, taxonomies and search. Complex software IA organises the working environment so people can do their work: maintaining orientation across multi-session investigations, supporting non-linear exploration, and managing multiple simultaneous representations of the same data.
📄️ Task Landscapes
Traditional software design decomposes work into task hierarchies: goals into sub-goals, sub-goals into steps, and steps into actions. This is a logical arrangement, well suited to linear, well-structured tasks. It does not adequately describe complex professional work.
📄️ Wayfinding
Mirel argues that wayfinding receives too little design attention in complex problem-solving software, despite its importance to completing the work.
📄️ Multiple Representations
Professional software presents multiple views of the same data at once, reflecting Mirel's observation that expert problem solvers hold structural, functional, and organisational representations of their work and need to move between them fluidly. A 3D application might present a viewport (spatial), a properties panel (parametric), a timeline (temporal), a node graph (procedural), a scene hierarchy (structural), and a render preview (output). All represent the same scene. A video editor does something similar with its timeline, source monitor, program monitor, effects panel, and audio mixer. Such arrangements are standard in professional software.